Wage controls, profit controls, exchange controls and other inflation-related restrictions similarly make it harder for businesses to function.
When the U.S. government imposed wartime wage controls, employers could no longer compete for workers by offering higher salaries.
On the government side, unions were powerful, price and wage controls were a reality, and tax rates were high.
To get around World War II wage controls, companies began offering employer-paid health insurance when they couldn't pay needed workers extra cash.
The origins of this go back to WWII, when companies tried to get around wage controls by offering workers fringe benefits in lieu of cash.
When the government recognizes that all its efforts to control inflation are too tepid and thus futile, it will eventually institute price and wage controls.
Despite massive unemployment, firms are discouraged from hiring by over-mighty unions, wage controls and a complex system of payroll levies, not to mention a lack of suitable skills among the workforce.
Equally important is the fact that unless healthcare providers are able to defend, on moral grounds, their right to profit from their activities, they will be unable to resist any wage controls, price controls, or forced participation in government healthcare programs that may be placed upon them.
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Wage-price controls could then be imposed to suppress inflation, just as happened under President Richard Nixon.
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When the Nixon administration imposed wage and price controls, I was a correspondent in Chicago for Business Week magazine.
We should also not overlook the threat to economic freedom posed by even mild inflation, as the U.S. experiment with wage-price controls illustrated in the early 1970s.
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The rate of inflation as represented by the CPI slowed in 1972 to 3.2% from 4.3% in part because of wage and price controls, and then rose 5.6% in 1973.
Among the proposals he wrote about most frequently were: severing the link to gold and letting the dollar float, fighting inflation by reducing the growth of the money supply, ending the draft, abolishing wage and price controls, and cutting taxes.
The government supercharged growth, stimulating demand with wage increases, price controls, an undervalued peso and public works.
Wartime wage-and-price controls were swept away, as was the rationing of food, gasoline and other items.
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Against the wishes of the Allied occupiers, he overnight threw out the German system of rationing and wage-and-price controls.
Despite espousing free-market principles, Nixon actually went on to impose wage-and-price controls as well as protectionist measures on foreign trade.
The government has requested assistance from the IMF and from the African Development Bank, but in 2011 was not able to meet the targets-including cutting the wage bill and improving spending controls-necessary to receive aid.
We still have a minimum wage and New York still has rent controls.
Pennsylvania State Treasurer Barbara Hafer, president of the National Association of State Auditors, Comptrollers and Treasurers which controls trillions of investment dollars, has repeatedly called on state governments to wage economic war on terrorism.
The story goes back at least as far as World War II, when industries, desperately competing for labor but unable to raise wages under wartime price controls, began offering health insurnace as a form of compensation exempt from wage restrictions.
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